- "It is not proper for a wise man.�.�.

to come to the conclusion �this alone is

truth, and everything else is false."

- "Buddhist teachers counsel us to abandon anger, develop patience, give up

attachment, and understand the absence of self;"

- "As this implies, to develop a sense of self is healthy and necessary. According
to Buddhism, the problem isn�t that we have a self; on the contrary, there�s never
been a real self, so there�s nothing to discard. Nor do we need to get rid of the
sense of self; that�s necessary to function in daily life. The problem is a sense
of self that feels and believes itself to be separate from the rest of the world."

- "Properly understood, the sense of lack is what motivates us to undertake the

spiritual path, which is what�s necessary to really resolve it. Yet what usually
happens is that the problem becomes projected and therefore insoluble: I believe
that what I lack is something outside myself, so I become preoccupied with external
things."

- "The Dharma is not a secure refuge. He who enjoys a secure refuge is not
interested in the Dharma but is interested in a secure refuge".

- "Different processes: my eyes perceiving colored shapes, and my mind identifying

them with a name: that is a pen. Moreover, there�s a third process involved. I
don�t see a bunch of objects that just happen to be where they are. Instead, to see
something as a pen is to also �see� its function, which is implied by its name: the
pen is for writing with, the sheets of paper can be written on, and so forth"

- "The Buddha warned against eternalism and annihilationism. Eternalism is the view
that the self survives death. Annihilationism is the opposite view, that the self
is destroyed at death. Both beliefs suffer from the same misconception: that there
is a discrete self, which either is destroyed or is not destroyed when the body
dies. They assume the same duality between a self and the world it is �in.�

- "In terms of human evolution, nonattachment is an advanced teaching. I�m

suggesting that we need to be able to form satisfying human attachments before
genuine nonattachment is possible."

- "Neither tradition by itself provides the full picture of who we are, what our
problem is, and how we transform."

- "According to the eighteenth-century Japanese Zen master Hakuin, the difference

between buddhas and other beings is like that between water and ice: just as there
is no ice without water, so there are no sentient beings that are not buddhas�which
suggests that deluded beings are simply �frozen� buddhas."

- "A FAMILIAR IMPLICATION is the Chan/Zen insistence that enlightenment is nothing

more than realizing the true nature of the ordinary activities of one�s everyday
mind. When Hui Hai was asked about his own practice, he replied: �When I�m hungry I
eat; when tired I sleep."

- "Nirvana is right here, before our eyes.

This very place is the Lotus Land, this very body, the Buddha."
�HAKUIN

- "There are different ways to meditate because there are different ways to �let
go.�"

- "As described by the twelfth-century Japanese Zen master Dogen Kigen in a well-
known passage from his Shobogenzo:
To study Buddhism is to study yourself. To study yourself is to forget yourself. To
forget yourself is to be awakened by the ten thousand things. When awakened by the
ten thousand things, your body and mind as well as the body and mind of others drop
away."
�GENJOKOAN

- "Nisargadatta Maharaj has summarized this process most elegantly: �When I look
inside and see that I am nothing, that�s wisdom. When I look outside and see that I
am everything, that�s love. Between these two my life turns.� Wisdom and
compassion: the two wings of the dharma."

- "Mahayana Buddhist teachings sometimes talk about �the nonduality of emptiness

(shunyata) and appearance.� There is an important difference between how things
usually appear to us, and what they really are. But the term �appearance� can be
misleading insofar as it seems to imply that the world we normally perceive is
nothing more than a dream-like illusion. Traleg Kyabgon Rinpoche explains this
well: �Appearance� is a funny sort of word. It means some kind of surface thing,
but with something else called �reality� that is behind it. �Presence� is a much
better word. Something is presenting by itself, whose essence is emptiness. What
appears is the phenomenal world, but it is empty because it has no real substance."

- "If you think of ourselves as coming out of the earth, rather than having been
thrown in here from somewhere else, you see that we are the earth, we are the
consciousness of the earth. These are the eyes of the earth. And this is the voice
of the earth."
�JOSEPH CAMPBELL, The Power of Myth

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